The Comparative Governance and Policy Research Centre of the Department of Government & International Studies at Hong Kong Baptist University and Civil Rights Observer establish The Election Observation Project (EOP) with an objective to become an independent academic platform for the 2019 District Council election. EOP offers support to election monitoring networks in all the 18 districts in Hong Kong and conducts a comprehensive examination on the electoral process.
EOP will be carried out with reference to international standards for democratic elections—including but not limited to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, Code of Conduct for International Election Observers, as well as authoritative international academic research on electoral integrity and election observations in different parts of the world. EOP researchers will examine incidents of electoral malpractice, if any, investigate what cause them, and put forth reform proposals. We encourage civic participation in defense of electoral integrity which in our view has a positive effect on democratic development.
EOP makes use of web-based and social media platform and provides civic education activities and workshops in order to encourage concerned citizens across the 452 constituencies to collect and verify information at the district level. We focus on the factors promoting and undermining electoral integrity. For that, EOP intends to provide objective, reliable, evidence-based comments and analyses for Hong Kong and the international community. We intend to issue public statements throughout the election process to point out any sign of malpractice and to produce EOP reports, advising measures to consolidate a free and fair election according to International standards and code of practice.
One of EOP’s first actions in examining electoral integrity is to ask the Electoral Affairs Commission and the Returning Officers across the 18 districts what criteria or justifications there may be for disqualifying prospective candidates in the upcoming elections.
Meanwhile, workshops are organized to begin building the grassroot network for groundwork of EOP. We shall reach out to higher education institutions and engage citizen in the neighborhoods to train attentiveness for the various forms of electoral malpractice.
As election process enter the campaigning and preparation stages, EOP extends its operation and network, disseminating news and information by means of events, press conference, public statements, media interviews and our web-based platforms.
We intend to invite prominent international experts and scholars to act as EOP’s overseas advisors whose roles include overseeing our work on the ground and connecting EOP with our international interlocutors.
Our Members
Mr Andrew Shum Wai-nam
Member of Civil Rights Observer
Dr Leung Kai-chi
Part Time Lecturer, School of Journalism and Communication, The Chinese University of Hong Kong
Dr Kenneth Chan Ka-lok
Associate Professor, Department of Government and International Studies and Director, Comparative Governance and Policy Research Centre, Hong Kong Baptist University
Mr Lai Yan-ho
Part Time Lecturer, Department of Government and International Studies, Hong Kong Baptist University
Dr Leung Chi-yuen
Teaching Fellow, Department of Applied Social Science, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University
Our Overseas Advisors
Mr. Miroslaw Adamczyk, Poland (Former Consul-General of Poland in Hong Kong)
A lawyer by training, Miroslaw Adamczyk was Consul-General of Poland in Hong Kong and Macau from April 2014 to September 2019.
Prof. Michael C. Davis, Global Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, DC.
Michael C. Davis (戴大為) is the Professor of Law and International Affairs at India’s O.P. Jindal Global University, a Senior Research Scholar at the Weatherhead East Asia Institute at Columbia University, and a Global Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, DC. Until stepping down in 2016, he was professor in the Law Faculty at the University of Hong Kong, where he remains a non-resident senior fellow in the Centre for Comparative and Public Law.
Prof. Victoria Hui, University of Notre Dame, USA
Victoria Tin-bor Hui is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Notre Dame. She focuses on comparative history of Asia and Europe, state formation and state-society relations, contentious politics and resistance movements, transformation of world politics, political culture, Asian and Confucian values, and Chinese politics.
As a native of Hong Kong, Hui also analyzes Hong Kong politics. She testified at Congress, has maintained a blog “The Umbrella Movement and Beyond,” and has published an article “Hong Kong’s Umbrella Movement: The Protest and Beyond” in the Journal of Democracy.
Prof. Marie Mendras, Sciences Po – CNRS, Paris
Marie Mendras is a specialist of Russian and post-Soviet studies. She is a research fellow with the Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS) and a professor at Sciences Po’s School of International Affairs in Paris.
Between 1991 and 2014 Mendras served as Election Observer, with the OSCE, the French Parliament, or other institutions, to monitor presidential and legislative elections, and constitutional referendum in Russia, Ukraine, and Armenia.
Mendras was a Visiting Scholar at the Department of Government and International Studies, Hong Kong Baptist University during the Second Semester 2018/2019.
5. Prof. Pippa Norris, Harvard University and Electoral Integrity Project, USA
Pippa Norris, is Founding Director Electoral Integrity Proejct, Laureate Professor of Government and International Relations, University of Sydney and McGuire Lecturer in Comparative Politics, Harvard University. Her research compares electoral integrity, public opinion and voting behavior, democratic institutions and cultures, gender politics, and political communications in many countries worldwide.
Recent books published include Strengthening Electoral Integrity (CUP 2017), Election Watchdogs (edited with Alessandro Nai, OUP 2017), Checkbook Elections: Political Finance in Comparative Perspective (ed. with Andrea Abel van Es, OUP 2016), Why Elections Fail (Cambridge University Press 2015), Contentious Elections: From Ballots to Barricades (Routledge, ed. with Richard W. Frank and Ferran Martinez i Coma, 2015). Why Electoral Integrity Matters (Cambridge University Press, 2014), and Advancing Electoral Integrity (Oxford University Press, ed. with Richard W. Frank and Ferran Martinez i Coma, 2014).
Eva Pils, Professor of Law at The Dickson Poon School of Law at King’s College London
Eva Pils is Professor of Law at The Dickson Poon School of Law at King’s College London, where she teaches human rights, public law, and law and society in China. Her scholarship focuses on human rights, authoritarianism, and law in China. She has written on these topics in both academic publications and the popular press. She is author of China’s human rights lawyers: advocacy and resistance (Routledge, 2014) and of Human rights in China: a social practice in the shadows of authoritarianism (Polity, 2018).
Before joining King’s in 2014, Eva was an associate professor at The Chinese University of Hong Kong Faculty of Law. She is an affiliated scholar at the US-Asia Law Institute of New York University Law School, an external member of the Chinese University of Hong Kong Centre for Social Innovation Studies, an external fellow of the Bingham Centre for the Rule of Law and a legal action committee member of the Global Legal Action Network.
Mr. Ichal Supriadi, Secretary-General, Asia Democracy Network, Korea
Ichal Supriadi has over 10 years’ experience in promoting democratic values in the Asian region through election monitoring. He has worked in the field of elections since 1998 through KIPP Indonesia on election monitoring and observation. He continued his work on the regional level through the Asian Network for Free Elections (ANFREL) since 2007 coordinating, managing, strategizing, and designing programs to effectively promote free and fair elections in the region. He joined the ADN as Secretary-General in 2018.
Chandanie Watawala, Executive Director, Asian Network for Free Elections (ANFREL)
Chandanie Watawala has been involved in organizing several of ANFREL’s election observation missions as Mission Coordinator, and was the manager in charge of ANFREL’s Myanmar office from June 2015 to August 2016. She has been participating in i nternational election observation missions since 2007 and has observed 15 elections. Prior to her work in ANFREL, she has been with different organizations. She started her NGO activism in Sri Lanka as a National Human Rights Coordinator to Caritas Sri Lanka (SEDEC), a Program Associate for the Southeast Asia Program of Forum Asia, and as a Fund Raising Adviser at the Voluntary Service Overseas (VSO). She concurrently serves as a Steering Committee Member of Asian Democracy Network (ADN), an umbrella organization of various regional networks in Asia.